[REVIEW] Bye Sea, by Tony Mancus

 

 

Tree Light Books
41 pages, $12

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

Tony Mancus’ wonderful chapbook collection Bye Sea is a fascinating excursion into cultural sea tropes and the ways we reclaim them for the personal or private. In this whimsical collection, pirates, madras, the sea shanty, weather predictions (very sailor), cartography, model ships in bottles, and yes, even treasure chests are recreated, or more accurately, regrown into a set of individual gestures that seek to expand outside of their cultural associations while they are still at some level unable to escape them.

However, the first thing that strikes you when reading this collection is not the poems, though they deserve our best attention, but the inspired typography and design. Everything about this collection speaks to the quality of the design process. The cover bears a beautiful, original screen-print of an octopus. (I have a great deal of affection for the octopus, so perhaps I am biased!) The typography and page layouts throughout also are absolutely gorgeous. In all honesty, this is one of the most aesthetically pleasing reading experiences I have had in quite some time.

One thing the typography does that interests me involves the variability of the size, placement, and opacity of titles and numerals. In all instances, the poem titles are enormous, often translucent gray (sometimes with a rainbow effect of shadings) and fixed sometimes directly behind, sometimes just above, sometimes to the side of the text. This is in no way distracting in the way that you might think. Reading the texts and titles in this kind of juxtaposition becomes textural, a kind of multilayered visual experience that is only pleasurably distracting. It becomes almost a homophonic reading experience, almost contrapuntal. Just going on the typography alone, this book is a gem. (It is the kind of book you want to store in a box like a keepsake or in a plastic sleeve for comics to prevent damage.)

Happily, Bye Sea is also one of those instances where form and function are equally aesthetic! It is worth noting that three poems from this chapbook, “Heated madras,” “If you have to carry what some call sin,” and “Reeling the knots: call and response,” were nominated for the 2013 Pushcart Prize. One thing that sets Mancus apart is his ability to craft lush, energetic, and intensely quotable lines. For example, “If you have to carry what some call sin” contains this tremendously original sequence:

     Well that settles that, never
your mind o’er
nature’s beast: to have eaten each other
and converted

sing hallelujah friends, let the good lord

skin whatever you wear, and wear it.

I really, really love the line “let the good lord / skin whatever you wear, and wear it.” It is two parts Whitman’s barbaric yawp and one part Halleluiah!

Another example of this is the fascinating list-like paean at the beginning of “Fore and aft”:

          this origin
this brining
this ardor
or arms together a lot
this silence noble
this salt

Asi-o

this vile
this halt
this very heart
-shaped heart

I have had the lines “this vile / this halt / this very heart / -shaped heart” running through my head on and off for days like a kind of poetic earworm. I think it is because the sequence takes chances with ideas around the heart, which is often a kind of everlast of camp and cliché. Yet, these lines skirt that, and more interestingly, skirt that while also, repetitively, comparing a heart to itself. It’s a fascinating sort of anti-metaphor as metaphoric gesture.

One of the things I enjoyed about this collection is the way Mancus uses objects or tropes as a springboard for private moments (a kind of signpost where “to go away from” is the only listed direction). In “Sailor be warmed,” he twists the apocryphal meteorological saying of “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning; Red sky at night, sailors’ delight” into a sad character portrait that rewrites some level of intimacy into a stereotypical Ahab-like caricature. He writes:

RED SKY AT MORNING, sailors drunk in the
flophouse. Red sky at night and the chickenshit
captain’s lips flutter at each word he sends down
from the prow. What mutiny has he heard in his
heart? “How did I get here?” he asks.

It is as if his character suddenly begins when arriving at line five. This collection might be deeply aesthetic, but it is also highly entertaining.

Overall, Bye Sea is rollicking good fun (at one point I thought it may have given me scurvy!), and it is a gorgeous book object. I love themed collections, and this one never suffers from the exhausting singularity that themed poetic sequences can display.

***

Hannah Rodabaugh received her MA from Miami University and her MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School. Her work was included in Flim Forum Press’ anthology: A Sing Economy. Recently, her work has been published or is forthcoming in Defenestration, Used Furniture Review, Palimpsest, Similar:Peaks::, Horse Less Press Review, Drupe Fruits, Smoking Glue Gun, and Nerve Lantern. Her chapbook, With Words: Verse in Concordance, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.